Bands who dream of go­ing it alone can just dream on

All the talk about a brave new world where you and your band could make it without hav­ing to nav­i­gate the tra­di­tional record com­pany route thanks to the lib­er­at­ing ef­fect of the in­ter­net has turned out to be just talk. Yes, you can use MyS­pace etc to pro­mote your work, and, yes, can be­come your own record com­pany and dis­trib­ute and sell your wares without a mid­dle man be so very David and G this sim­ply hasn’t happ given the way is in­dust struc­tured, it prob­a­bly

Even those acts – Ar Lily Allen – who suppo on MyS­pace all had hug be­hind them; their so-c “grass­roots ap­peal” wa use­ful mar­ket­ing line. A Ra­dio­head may have do In Rain­bows, but only a spent mil­lions build­ing up over a se­ries of albu they had the name recog­ni­tion.

It’s al­ways been one most cu­ri­ous as­pects o in­dus­try that even the rock’n’roll, stick-it-to­types will quickly fall i be­hind a “let’s be all c cul­tural” record comp cam­paign. And the de in­die la­bels (which, in op­er­ate, can be more r un­eth­i­cal than the maj al­ways been a strange that a ma­jor la­bel was enough for the likes of Sex Pis­tols and Nir­van

Try­ing to forge a ca on­line, com­pet­ing with mil­lions of other acts, “scream­ing in space”, ac­cord­ing to a new rep by the global In­ter­na­tional Fed­er­a­tion of the Phono­graphic In­dus­try (IFPI), which looked at all the facts, fig­ures and sales re­ports avail­able.

Fur­ther­more, the min­i­mum spend re­quired to give a new band on a ma­jor la­bel a fight­ing chance in to­day’s hys­ter­i­cal mar­ket­place is ¤1 mil­lion. This breaks down to about ¤200,000 for the artist’s ad­vance; ¤200,000 for record­ing costs, ¤200,000 for pro­duc­ing three videos (if your al­bum hasn’t and re-record it); ¤100,000 for tour sup­port; and ¤300,000 for pro­mo­tion and mar­ket­ing.

You will have no­ticed that the amount spent on pro­mo­tion and mar­ket­ing is higher than the amount spent on ac­tu­ally record­ing the al­bum. So much for your “art”, dude.

The only way to pay this ¤1 mil­lion back is to amass record ¤1 mil­lion; only then will n a profit. This is why a n be No 1 in the charts, all e ra­dio and sell­ing out the also mas­sively in debt and n earn­ing the av­er­age al wage. Is it any won­der nd drugs get abused a tad in ic world? con­sider that, at a rough , only one out of 10 ma­jor ts ac­tu­ally man­ages to his debt and turn a profit. ch is why the Cold­plays and ady Ga­gas are ef­fec­tively pay­ing for the other nine acts on the la­bel. It’s a crap hoot, which ex­plains the larm­ing turnover of bands, he flavours of the month uickly con­signed to the bin less they man­age to rform. The point re­mains that, pite all the flak they ttract, the record mpa­nies are still the only s with the ex­pe­ri­ence, ent and knowl­edge to pick t up out of a crappy lit­tle ue and place them at the per­most of the pop­per­most. All the in­die pieties in the won’t change that. Yes, it your “art”, but tell that to bby. As the old Stiff Records used to say: “Money talks. mum­ble.”